– Hanging chads and the most controversial election result in generations

– Co-founder of “Current TV” network (with Joel Hyatt)

…Or will Mr. Gore just be best remembered for being a hilarious “head-in-a-jar” (a preachy, boring one at that) on the animated TV show Futurama?

So, will Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. best be remembered for something “positive” or something “negative?”

There’s a saying from an Australian philanthropist, lifesaver and pubbuilder known as Sheepshagger John which may help you predict the answer, “You know, a man can do a thousand great things, but if you “shag” one lousy sheep…”– (5) (7)

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Like many people I make use of virtual servers from a major domain provider. It’s so easy to provision a server, setup a new domain name and add email addresses. The cloud is truly easy and low cost for a small business, but there is a catch. One that hit me this week.

I use godaddy.com as my provider, and this week they were hit by a denial of server (DDOS) attack.

It seems some would-be anarchist thought that taking down a lot of websites would either be fun or would make a point. Well I have no idea what point they were trying to make, but it was truly annoying.

It seems that even a single spotty teenager can take down a huge cloud with a few zombie machines.

It seems that to keep the cost of the cloud down and to make it easy to use, they skimped on security.

What did bring a little light into a dark situation was that they definetly use their own servers for their help desk. I called the helpdesk number when I noticed the servers were down and what I heard at the other end was frankly excellent.

Rather than the ususal “Welcome to Godaddy’s help desk queue. Your business is important to us, so we will make you listen to this message for a while etc..” what I got was “w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w go, go, go, go godaddy go, go go, welc, welc, welc” it was like a blast from the past. I thought I may have reached either max headroom or possibly the HAL 9000 just after Dave had removed those circuit boards.

I didn’t get to speak to a help desk agent, but while waiting I picked up the story online from a dozen sources, so knew what was going on.

The systems were down for several hours. I hear it may have been ALL their clients who were down.

Here’s hoping cloud technology implementations get better, there is no way that large cloud vendors can survive longterm if they don’t work out how to move beyond this (low) level if risk.

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All organizations now have some sort of a digital strategy and “social media marketing” as part of their plan.

It seems like a no-brainer – Facebook and Twitter accounts are free and we can use the interns and “young employees” along with a few extra cycles from the PR guy. It’s Win-Win. Free advertising. No foreseeable downside, right?

Example For Your Review: A major college football program (Arizona State), and their conference which generates more than a quarter of a billion dollars per season (The Pac 12), learned the hard way that it isn’t always “Win-Win” with no downside. The program recently had its pre-season “Pac 12 Media Days” and scheduled press conferences with Q&A for each team’s head coach, including ASU’s new leader Todd Graham. “Use that interweb social media stuff to promote the event!” was the likely command from the 60+ year old university leadership to the underpaid 22 year-old running social media for the school, along with, “Do your Tweeter thing and get us some new viewers!” The young social marketer thought it would be a great idea to get fans involved in the Q&A by allowing them to tweet questions directly to the coachvia the #AskASU hashtag during the televised event in front of a room full of media. Well, what occurred was what is known as a “hijacking” – In this case, fans of ASU’s new coach’s previous team (the Pitt Panthers), took this opportunity to ask their former leader a “few” questions about the circumstances of his abrupt and unexpected departure last December.

You see, less than a year after being hired to a 5-year contract by Pitt (and unbeknownst to his employers), Graham took another job to coach the Arizona State University football team. He informed his team and Pitt via a text forwarded to a Pitt football administrator. Graham took a lot of heat in the national media, especially in football-crazy Pittsburgh. Ridiculed during his 1-year Pitt tenure for his use of football platitudes like “high-octane offense” and panned for throwing his players under the figurative bus, there was no love lost between the coach and the Steel City. He also called ASU his “dream job” after saying the exact same thing about his previous employer 12 months earlier.

The Twitter “question” queue was completely dominated by Pitt tweets and included:

Coach when you mentioned speed speed speed, were you then hinting at how fast you would be leaving Pitt? #AskASU

Coach G, you do realize that allowing transfers without penalty is only a privilege for Penn State students, right? #AskASU

#AskASU coach, what are your thoughts on having more wins than Joe Pa last year? Will you use that for your next dream job?

What genius catchphrase will you invent this year that’s bound to be taken so seriously by the students in Tempe? #AskASU

Coach, would you leave Penni if an opportunity for a “dream” wife came along? #AskASU

Hey Todd, my grandmas cat passed away, can you text her the bad news. I dont have the heart. #AskASU

Coach Graham- How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop…or do you just quit licking and leave half-way? #AskASU

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Todd (aka Fraud) Graham: Did social media help get him labeled as “the devil himself?”

-Win-win? No downside? Maybe not. This hijacking was so thorough that news outlets saw how high it was trending and wrote stories about it and the coach in question. His status as a pariah and example of what’s wrong with college sports is now complete.

Trying to use social media to promote your company or organization is a little like trying to domesticate a chimpanzee or tiger… it’s a only a matter of when you’ll get bitten so think about the risks and prepare for the good and the bad that comes with this “free” marketing/PR.